One of the most compelling attributes of Web 2.0 is that it transformed the static Interweb from something pushed at us to something that includes our inputs. The coincidence of Howard Dean's intelligent use of the Web, the rise of Facebook in public consciousness and Barack Obama's very technologically-savvy campaign has led to the expectation that Government 2.0 would quickly follow.

When a BI vendor claims they are the market leader of anything, according to IDC, you need to be clear on what exactly gets counted. In other words, study the taxonomy on page three of IDC's latest report...

Oh, sure, you may be a high flying enterprise architect, DBA, infrastructure engineer, or coder, but your friends and family all think: you work in IT. You love IT. And, "you must want to take care of my consumer grade tech needs because you love IT so much." Riiiight. How can you satisfy them and still have time for summer fun?

Till now, certification requirements for electronic medical records were pretty hefty, addressing hundreds of stringent criteria that comprehensive inpatient and ambulatory systems must meet in order to get a seal of approval from the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, or CCHIT, a non-profit federally supported group.

Information Builders topped the list of seven vendors that agreed to participate in the study with a value index of 93%, followed by IBM Cognos Software, Infor, Softscape, Arcplan, Actuate, Symphony-Metreo, Microsoft and InetSoft, respectively.

A new Google Apps client includes a Flash-based analysis application that uses Google Docs in presenting an intuitive user interface that allows casual information workers to navigate through large amounts of data to generate business insights.

Andrew Hoppin, CIO of the New York State Senate, is working to leverage information technology to get more people involved in politics. Politics needs more voices from the left, right, and center, he said. "Not just professional voices, the people paid to be there, but the people who are interested and have a concern about the workings of the legislators," he said.

Visualization guru Stephen Few reminds us that analyst opinions, while offered by recognized experts, are inherently personal, and that on the other side of the table, there are real people behind products, marketing campaigns, and corporate decisions. But I disagree with Steve that analysts should always name names. Some situations become simply too personal...

Summer's slower pace allows time to work through material set aside for calmer days. My reading list includes works on Information Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis, and Visualization. The items on my list are technical and accessible, of potential interest to anyone who works with analytics. You might also find them worth at least a quick look.

While Twitter and YouTube have proven strategic for election protesters in Iran, the US Defense Department is "way behind the power curve" on social networking, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week. Military leaders need to get on Facebook and other social networking sites themselves, to learn how they're used firsthand.

Stop that madness. Before you 'just buy more' think about looking at how you can improve your applications today. Yes, we're talking about load balancers, WAN optimizers, SSL appliances, and network monitoring systems; the stuff true IT geeks love. Cool Tools that can improve performance without spending more on bandwidth.
Mike Fratto, lead Analyst at InformationWeek Analytics, has a new report on improving delivery of applications by leveraging performance tools and appliances.

I ran my local chamber of commerce's 5k this past Friday. Total time elapsed from leaving the office to going home: 90 minutes. Previous experience showed that I could change, travel, then run the same course on my own with half the total elapsed time: 45 minutes. Many participants of a large IT project would be seriously ticked off at a 200% inefficiency; but that would be silly.

Finjan's most recent Cybercrime Intelligence report pulls the covers off a clandestine, underground network of buyers and sellers of a new and valuable commodity, your spyware infected computer! Read on for the details.

The Industry Standard reported yesterday that SaaS-base BI vendor LucidEra is set to shutter the business and put all assets up for sale. The story named only "a person familiar with the company's situation" as the source. There's no official word on the Web site and all my attempts to reach the company have failed thus far.

It's always compelling news when an open source project of some renown is forked. It's twice as compelling when it's a fork of a project you use and rely on personally. I speak of Melody, a spinoff of the open-source branch of the blogging and publishing system Movable Type.

Is the economy helping or hurting your BI efforts? Maybe a down economy is forcing you to work smarter, or maybe layoffs and budget cuts are putting a dent in your BI strategy. Two years ago, 42% of you had standardized on a BI platform. Have industry consolidation or the economy changed that? And if so, which vendors are you standardizing on?

In two short years, Twitter has gone from a startup to celebrity plaything. Now, in the case of the election demonstrations in Tehran, it's apparently a serious tool of U.S. foreign policy. This leaves IT managers in government and business with the important role of steering their organizations between the twin dangers that face any fashionable emerging technology: Irrational exuberance on the one hand, and excessive skepticism on the other.

Back when I did a lot of security work, we used to joke around that single sign on should be called "single vulnerability". Maybe single provider cloud models should be called "single point of failure".

The IDC Competitive Analysis Report lists SAP BusinessObjects as the clear leader of the business intelligence tools market, and says SAP is "well positioned to fulfill the future needs of BI technology purchasers."

NASA's launch of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite marks one of the space agency's first "participatory missions," says Chris Kemp, CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center. From their backyards, as well as from Moon-gazing tools from Google and Microsoft, the public will be able to view high-resolution images of our celestial neighbor.

We may be on the verge of significant changes to US Federal government policy on the use of persistent cookies. The White House blog is inviting comment on how a new cookie policy should be shaped... My recommendations for a new policy are fairly straightforward...

Search-cum-enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Autonomy has announced an integration for its recently acquired WorkSite product with the iPhone... Smart mobile devices are increasingly usurping laptops as the mobile computing device of choice, so secure access to documents via the iPhone makes a great deal of sense...

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.